I WANT YOU TO TAKE A SECOND and think of your favorite album. If that’s too hard, which I would assume it is for so many of us, I want you to think of one that has impacted you incredibly in some way. It could’ve been the soundtrack for an awful or overwhelmingly happy time, or the album that changed the way you felt about someone or something.

I PUT MY FAITH ON A SHELF YEARS AGO. At fourteen, I began seeing a very sweet but wayward girl who acted in direct opposition to the stringent brand of Christianity her mother had built their life around. At the time it was difficult to reconcile the raw issues she was working through with the black and white simplicity of my church.

ON OCTOBER 25TH we were one month out. We would soon be celebrating the election of Hillary Clinton—childhood hero of Rory Gilmore—and watching Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, filling our hearts with the limited victories of progressivism while our eyes went bloodshot from binging.

I SAW LADY BIRD AT PERHAPS THE MOST ADVANTAGEOUS TIME for the film to just tear my heart to pieces. I had moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, seven months before, away from Chicago where I had done my last three years of growing up, and the Midwest, where I had done all of my growing up.

ARCADE FIRE'S NEWEST FULL-LENGTH RECORD, EVERYTHING NOW raises questions about the eerily steady growth of this removed, cellophane quality about the world. This is nothing new—the band has provided commentary on a range of big picture ideas throughout their musical history.

I ENJOY THE FEELING of belonging—an unromantic and pure intimacy with the things with which I choose to spend time. Maybe more than anything, I seek to find on the screen, and on a record, a mirror with which I can see myself more fondly.

I STARTED WATCHINGMad Men in March 2017 because I wanted to learn how to become a better person. I thought Don’s journey would educate me on the repercussions of lying and subtle manipulations. He knew his weaknesses, and for the most part, he chose to ignore them.

WHEN ANTONOFF BEGAN teasing Gone Now, Bleachers’ second full-length album, I began to look for signs of Strange Desire. The first single, “Don’t Take the Money”, had hints of Desire—it was raucous, fun, upbeat music with underpinnings of pain. It was familiar in the best way.

Fatimah Asghar, a Ruth Lily and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, is a poet, screenwriter, and educator based in Chicago. Her chapbook After (Yes Yes Books) was published in 2015, and her debut poetry collection If They Come for Us(One World/Random House) was released in the summer of 2018. She is also the creator behind the 2017 Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls, which is now in development at HBO. Her work can be found in Poetry, Gulf Coast, The Margins, and many others.

“Born from a desire to build a presence and find the unknown, Porte Nef moves between absurd and technical object. The symbolism lives in a strong vision of the coming machine in a forgotten zone, of solitude and improbable meetings: ghost town, memories of Soljenitsyne, solitary walkers, nameless rivers and abandonment relinquishment.”